Hello, gardeners and hivers!
I'm finally back to write another post, the last time I posted on Hive was last May. It's been a crazy summer...
I didn't grow as big of a garden this year due to all the work involved, and my back not liking all the work. I grew green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, and zucchini this year in the home garden. In my community garden plots, I grew some potatoes, flour corn, and a couple of pumpkin plants.
The green beans have all been harvested now, and the plants have been removed. I'm currently in the process of harvesting and canning the tomatoes as they get ripe. So far, I've only dug up 1 row of potatoes, I should be getting more dug this coming week.
Here are the tomato plants in my garden this year. In the first picture, you can see that I already removed a plant. There were 2 plants that were not doing very well, so I took them out of the raised bed.
The second picture is my straw bale growing experiment. One thing I found out about growing garden plants in straw bales is that they need a lot more watering than the raised beds or garden beds do. They dry out fairly quickly on dry summer days. Also, the tomato plants in the straw bales didn't grow as big as the ones in dirt, perhaps because of the watering issue.
The tomatoes in the greenhouse start getting ripe before
the ones out in the garden, but I still have a fair amount of tomatoes on the plants. A lot of them look like they're ripe, but they're still yellow inside, kind of frustrating when you want to harvest them.
I didn't grow as many carrots this year as I did last year, but I still have a nice patch of them in the raised bed.
My marigolds are doing really well this year, like last year. They seed themselves, so I really don't have to do much other than watering them when we have a dry spell. I take little plants out of this patch to put with the tomato plants once everything starts growing in the spring.
The big pots in front of the marigolds were used to grow the green beans again this year. I painted the pots white to keep the sun from heating them up too much in the summer. If the dirt gets too hot, it's bad for the plants.
For my last picture for this post, these are the 4 pumpkins that I got from my 2 plants this year. They're a nice size this year. The Howden heirloom pumpkin is a standard type of field pumpkin, not one of those plants that has 300 pound pumpkins.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for checking it out!
I hope you found it interesting!
